Life is a dance. Your every step, gesture and expression declares to the world who you are. This beautiful performance art symbolizes so much! Let’s start with exploring some quotes on dance.
Grief’s Dance
- Dance when you’re broken open, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. (…) and when you’re perfectly free. Rumi
- If you hit a wall, climb over it, crawl under it, or dance on top of it. Unknown
- The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. Alan W. Watts
When we are suffering from the change grief induces, we may feel as if we are broken or as if we’ve hit a wall. Many have derived comfort from comparing our grieving selves to a BROKEN piece of Kintsugi pottery.
Eternal Dance
- This world we live in is the dance of the creator. Dancers come and go in the twinkling of an eye but the dance lives on. Michael Jackson
- The dance goes on forever. So shall I. So shall we. Gelsey Kirkland
When we lose a loved one, particularly a child, it can be one of the most tragic events in our lives. However, when we ponder signs from nature or from dreams, it leaves evidence that life is an eternal dance. See My Mother’s Day Guest (nature), OUR VISITOR (nature), or MIRACLES AND DUETS (dream) as examples.
Artistic Dance
- Dancing is creating a sculpture that is visible only for a moment. Erol Ozan
- To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it. Osho
- To live is to be musical, starting with the blood dancing in your veins. Everything living has a rhythm. Do you feel your music? Michael Jackson
All the arts: dance, visual arts, music, theater, culinary, writing, etc. can be tremendously healing when it comes to living a balanced life, and easing any grief. See ERASE GRIEF for an example of how the visual arts can walk you through grief. While you are doing or viewing any of the arts, pay attention to how you feel. Your feelings will tell you whether that particular art is healing for you as an individual. Here is a study on the effects of dance on grief: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01472526.2019.1678294.
Your Unique Dance
- Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world. Voltaire
- Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. Friedrich Nietzsche
Finally, the arts are humanity’s way of of expressing our own way of being. Listen to the music, dance your dance. May you revel in being exactly who you are as you dance this dance called life!
YES!